Nor should Gargantua’s studious day (I. xxiii), no hour unfilled, no subject neglected, be called a program of education.[79] Rabelais must have been aware that for educational reform he had no warrant. Whatever else may be laid to his charge, he was not pretentious. His own education, interrupted, never carried through in any field, but widely ranging, gave him not a system, but a singularly various fund. His reputation for scholarship, recently urged, is hardly borne out by the few contemporary compliments. Rather their fewness and their vagueness, in a period of mutual admiration among scholars, suggest that he was less famous than he has been made to appear. He was not Latinist enough to detect the fabrication of the so-called Will of Lucius Cuspidius, which he published in 1532.[80] His Greek, extending to the translation of certain well-known Greek works of medicine,[81] may have been fortified by previous Latin translations. His knowledge of law is vouched by his abundant use of legal terms, evidence rather of his friendship with lawyers and his appetite for jargon. He knew medicine enough to be house physician at the Lyon Hôtel Dieu and personal physician in the suite of the Cardinal du Bellay. Certainly this is evidence, almost the only specific evidence, of his achievement in learning. But it should not imply that he was a scientist. At most he did not advance the narrow limits of the medicine current in his time. He was an acceptable practitioner in a period of prolonged ignorance.
But such generalizations are less suggestive than what has been laboriously pieced together of his very meager chronology. In 1530 he was matriculated in medicine at the University of Montpellier. In 1532 he was practicing medicine at Lyon and publishing the Latin letters of the Italian physician Manardi, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, the fabricated Cuspidius, and his own Pantagruel. This in two years. Within the two years preceding 1530 it is suggested that he may have studied law at Poitiers and visited other universities. Even if the suggestion could be brought to the dignity of an inference, what would it guarantee of learning? Except for a single undated letter from the priory of Ligugé, we have no documentation on Rabelais from 1521 to 1530. But if indeed he did study law at Poitiers and did visit other universities before he turned to medicine, or if he picked up some medicine on the way, then he was superficially experimenting toward versatility. The issue is sometimes dodged by calling him a humanist.[82] But though he had humanist friends, he was obviously not a classicist. Or again, his learning, because his allusions are astonishingly various, is called encyclopedic. As a compliment to learning, the adjective is dubious; but in another sense it is suggestive of his intellectual curiosity and his acute awareness of words. Knowing that there is much to be learned, as Dr. Johnson said, from the backs of books, he was alert to pick up a little of everything. He found that for his new readers bits of lore had the interest of news. While they liked his samples of learning and relished his satire on the pedantries of humanism, the humanists, seeing more in the joke, relished it none the less. It was gay, but also thoughtful, escape from the solemn Renaissance fictions of classicism. Rabelais already knew his readers well enough to carry them wine on both shoulders.
The insistent and various extravagance anticipated journalism in that it was the cultivation of style as advertisement. Besides perennial excitements of substance he uses dialect, slang, jargon, parody, oratory, not in ebullience, not in occasional outbreak, but in constant parade of style. He is a sensationalist; his readers are to be shocked and amused. So he turned to the grotesque, and so he pursued it. He has no winsome persons; his satire has no indignation; his laughter, no sympathy. In this aspect a most suggestive contrast is offered by Cervantes. “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away” is unjust because it is shallow. From the beginning and throughout, Don Quixote thrives on what Rabelais precludes, geniality. The grotesque of Cervantes is human enough to make us feel a certain social service beyond laughter in attacks on windmills; and his great achievement is the creation of a grotesque whom we come to love.
3. HISTORY
History straddles the fundamental division of composition into the forms of discussion or persuasion on the one hand and, on the other, those of story or play. For history is now one, now the other, and now both together. Earlier chronicles, more or less epic, hardly discuss at all; some recent histories are so bent on analysis as hardly to narrate at all; and some of the greater histories, ancient or modern, Thucydides, Tacitus, Macchiavelli, bring the two into effective combination. In any age this last is so difficult as to demand superior grasp. Livy, for instance, being generally content with narrative, hardly makes even his imaginary orations to troops expository. But Thucydides, narrating effectively, is no less concerned to instruct his readers in the issues. His “Expedition against Syracuse” thus became both tragedy and sermon.
(a) Latin Histories
The fifteenth century shows the advance of history beyond chronicle in the Latin of Leonardo Bruni, of Arezzo (1369-1444; Leonardi Aretini historiarum florentini populi libri XII, Florence, 1855-1860, 3 vols., ed. by Mancini, Leoni, and Tonietti, with the Italian translation of Donato Acciajuoli). Chronicles nevertheless persisted; for they still had, perhaps still have, the values realized by Herodotus. But Bruni undertook and fairly accomplished something more: “history, which in so many simultaneous events must keep the longer sequence, explain the causes of single facts, and bring out the interpretation” (I. 52). Not quite Thucydides or Tacitus, perhaps, he has clearly moved in their direction. His style is periodic in habit without often conforming strictly, humanistic without being laboriously imitative or diffuse, intelligently Ciceronian without being inhibited by Ciceronianism. The orations inserted after the fashion of Livy show, indeed, that he felt bound to such amplitude, variety, and classical allusion as should climb the high style; but they are neither frequent nor conventionally decorative, and some of them are both lively and urgent pleas. The following examples are typical.
Book III: Pope Gregory to the Florentines for peace through the restoration of the exiles; and the Florentine speech of refusal.
Book IV: Ianus Labella for insuring the republic against the pride of the nobles.